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A few weeks ago I read _Mirrors and Windows_, by John Szarkowski. (About whom we’ve [posted](http://one125.net/tagged/John+Szarkowski) once or twice before at _1/125_.) It’s pretty fantastic.

I’ve tried quite a few times since then to write a useful post about the subject, with little success; each draft tends to spiral out of control, until I feel like I’ve written myself into the middle of a book-length disquisition on the nature of photography. That’s an easy trap to fall into with Szarkowski, because he’s such a moving target; his writing is so rich with information, allusion, interpretation, and provocation that it is hard to keep attention focused on any one argument or claim.

So, I’m going to give up on trying to write one coherent post on the book tackling everything that really interests me (which would still have only touched on a fraction of everything contained in the brief essay in _Mirrors and Windows_) and write two or three shorter posts, instead.

Let’s start with this passage:

> During the first century of his existence, the professional photographer performed a role similar to that of the ancient scribe, who put in writing such messages and documents as the illiterate commoner and his often semiliterate ruler required. Where literacy became the rule, the scribe disappeared. By 1936, when Moholy-Nagy delcared that photography was the lingua franca of our time, and that the illiterate of the future would be he who could not use a camera, the role of the professional photographer was already greatly diminished from the days in which his craft was considered a skill close to magic. Today it is only in a few esoteric branches of scientific or technical work that a photographer can still claim mysterious secrets. (pp. 14-15)

This interests me because I think it helps me understand a confusion many photographers have regarding the nature of what they do.

Following the metaphor, let us assume that we are living in a time after that in which the scribe had a useful role — a time in which (in developed nations) everyone has the ability to read or write for themselves.

In that context, what do we make of someone apparently performing the functions of a scribe? Examples might include:

These are people who have technical skills which are not required for the normal, everyday reading and writing functions routinely performed by people in both their business and personal lives.

There are photographic equivalents to many of these functions — or, rather, there are photographic professions which have a similar relationship to the photo-literate as these professions do to the word-literate. For example, I doubt one hears the complaint that, “with digital, everyone is a crime scene photographer.” (Note: If there are any forensics people reading and I’m getting that wrong, please let me know.)

However, most types of professional photography currently being done today are not so well sequestered from the realm of everyday, non-professional photography, which is usually (although not quite accurately) classified as “amateur.” But there may still be parallels.

Of these post-scribe forms of technical literacy, the last — calligraphy — is the one that I find to be the most interesting in relation to photography. For our purposes, let calligraphy be defined as the practice of making series of written letters appear aesthetically pleasing; it is (or at least, can be) totally agnostic with regard to the meaning of words represented by those letters. It is about making things pretty, on demand.

I think calligraphy is interesting in relation to what people want from photography. Specifically, to what they want _when they first become excited_ about photography — when they stop regarding it as a routine task requiring no special knowledge or insight and begin to regard it as something they can and should do well. Perhaps even as something which they are _called_ to do well.

When people today feel that way about the written word, virtually none of them say, “_I want to be a calligrapher_.” They want to be novelists, or poets, or journalists, or what have you. They want to write something in which other people can find meaning, amusement, excitement, solace, escapism, or insight.

But when people feel that way about photography, huge droves of them turn to the photographic equivalents of calligraphy — like wedding photography, commercial portraiture, stock photography, and advertising — disciplines which are, at heart, dedicated to producing prettiness on demand.

Budding photographers are often obsessed with becoming skilled in technical areas related to these disciplines, so that they can be more “pro” — which, amusingly, means that these industries are generally less and less sustainable for those who actually do set up shop in them. (And, as with calligraphy, hand knitting, and similar crafts, this tends to shift the area of commercial viability away from doing the work in question and towards books, supplies, workshops, instructional videos, etc.)

Of course, that does not sum up every budding photographer. There are plenty of photographers who are deeply embedded in the art world (which has largely swallowed up serious photography), and photojournalism is not dead. And I would not suggest that art photography and photojournalism are not worthwhile pursuits.

But is there a photographic equivalent of a novel, at this point, or of a short story? (Equivalent in _use_ I mean, not in structure, like the “literary” photographs of Frank Gohlke.) Is there photography which is produced for and consumed by the general public, for the joy of it?

That is more questionable.

Certainly there are people who are making photography that I would consider to be suitable for this role; there is good photography that exists outside the art niche and apart from the perversely utilitarian industries of prettiness on demand, and also apart from the civic-minded function of photojournalism and documentary photography.

But what is happening to that photography after it is made? Some percentage of it is published in various forms, and some percentage of what is published is bought (if applicable) and viewed, but the extent to which that happens outside the art community or the community of people who identify as photographers is more questionable.

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2 Responses to “Calligraphy”

Not too sure about the death of the scribe. While many high school graduates can read competently, far less than 1% of society is capable of writing a short article, story, or essay worth publishing, let alone worth reading.

You make the inference that photography is different from other artforms: Is there photography which is produced for and consumed by the general public, for the joy of it? With the possible exception of music, I think that few other artforms are consumed by the general public. What percentage of the population read books? Essays? Poetry? How many seek out visual art? Performance art? Dance? Very little of these escape the confines of their “art communities”.

A pretty large percentage of the population reads books. It’s not everyone, of course, and the quality of the books people read is all over the map. People also consume text in many other forms — newspapers and magazines (I’ll do another post on the magazine situation in terms of photography, btw, since Szarkowski has some interesting things to say about that), and of course online. Twitter, if you’re following the right people, can be a venue for quite impressive writing. (Almost all of which is comedy, of course.)

In terms of the comparison to other art forms, I think it’s a bit off topic, for two reasons. One, most other art forms require specialized technical training which most people don’t have. The average person in the US or Europe does not casually make a work of sculpture or a painting in his or her day to day life; however, he or she quite probably does work with the written word to some degree and there’s a good chance they also make, share, and view photographs.

Of course, most people cannot write particularly well. And even those who can write particularly well often do not (Sturgeon’s law holds in every context, pretty much). What bugs me is that, for those who become excited about writing, there are lots of aspirations to pursue, some of which are part of the sequestered world of literature, created for and consumed by mainly a cultural elite, but many of which are created for and consumed by the general public. And in that realm of popular fiction and non-fiction, there is some good writing (although also much terrible writing).

In photography, it seems like there is nothing (or very little) filling the gap between ad/wedding/industrial/etc. photography and art photography. And that wasn’t always the case, and it maybe doesn’t have to always be the case in the future.

The point about music is interesting, and it would probably be worth elaboration by anyone but me. Certainly music (at large) has far more cultural penetration than probably any other medium, and most people have some degree of fluency in it — whether it’s being able to play an instrument or just being able to sing along with the radio. But the nature of creation/participation is different, esp. since it’s a performance thing.

But what if the distribution of music today (and the paths of aspiring musicians) were confined only to ad jingles, wedding marches, orchestral performances, marching bands, and singing in the shower?